Well after about 2 straight hours of being constantly disconnected, having the world server down, and random fatal errors our guild finally got into Uldar and got the Iron Council down.  At the time of this posting to my understanding the only guilds that downed the encounter were Forlorn Legacy - Windrunner (Thats us!) and Premonition -  Sen’jin.  It’s a very interesting fight similar to the Bug Trio in AQ40 but with new abilities.  Some people may say that this is a cop out on Blizzards part, not having “NEW UNIQUE ENCOUNTERS!” but IMO its a perfect blend of a boss with new abilities in a different style.  I like it!

A lot of people really stepped up to the plate for this.  It’s really really fucking enjoyable to see us play that well after months after months of old, repeated, easy content. The biggest let down of all of this is the PTR servers being totally unstable, its a real huge challenge to just get your entire raid in the zone.  It took us 4 attempts to get it down after all getting in there.  Sadly Brann Bronzebeard didn’t yell for us like he did for Premo, you can check out their page at http://premoguild.com/forums/portal.php  (Hey, it’s all love!)

Oh, and get this…we 24 manned it one of our ranged DPS was offline the entire fight.  GG Blizzard servers.

It would have been awesome to try some different kill orders because the “super power” of the small guy at the end is kinda weak after you figure it out.  I can also see why Blizzard made the heroism change (Enh Shaman here) because the enrage timer on this fight is 10 minutes.  It’s going to be neat to check out how all the damage testing on the Patchwerk Dummies will be.  Blizzard is making some smart changes to the class (hi expertise on UR instead of AGI) and I’m liking the direction they are taking it.  Sadly I couldn’t get a good feel for my DPS on Iron Council because Shock and Awe was broken, not showing Maelstrom Weapon procs.  The addon is pretty much required to do max dps.

All in all it was a pretty good night, we got a buncha combat logs from Council to go over and catch anything we missed during the fight.

Looking forward to finshing up some missing loot spots on my shaman and getting ready for Uldar Live.  See you there!

EDIT: Just heard Crimson - Greymane also downed the Council, I’m sure there might be a few others that I missed also.

Yesterday afternoon Daelo announced that Ulduar would open its doors at 4pm PST/7pm EST for testing Hodir. This goes without saying…but the servers were extremely laggy and unstable. The real challenge for the night was just getting into the raid instance. Our GM made the decision to transfer the guild over to the PVP server as opposed to the PVE server in hopes that the PVP server would have better stability…well if last night was any indication of what future PTR testing is going to be like, i’m not really looking forward to it. It was pretty difficult to get a raid together with the world server crashing every minute.

With any luck the realm stability will improve, i’ve heard from some friends over on the PVE server, and apparently it’s even worse. So, definitely glad we’re on the PVP server, even though getting ganked randomly is extremely annoying.

I’ve created a simple video that shows the 10man version of the Hodir fight. We were only able to get in a handful of attempts, but we managed to get him to 16% and ended up wiping to the enrage.

Hodir Preview - 3.1 PTR

I’m also testing out higher resolution streaming video on the website, please let me know what you think! Stay tuned for The Iron Council tomorrow night @ 4pm.

Nearly 3 months after the release of Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard is finally putting out some new content! Forlorn Legacy will be hitting the PTR’s very hard as soon as Ulduar is activated. Our good friend Daelo (Lead Encounter Developer @ Blizzard) announced a while back that there will be set times where people will be able to test Ulduar. He also said that certain encounters won’t be tested at all, and some encounters would be tested only on the European PTR’s. This is an interesting new approach Blizzard is taking to testing new raid content. Anyway, I wanted to share some thoughts on a few of the new features coming in Patch 3.1…

Ulduar

Most guild have had Naxxramas, The Obsidian Sanctum and The Eye of Eternity on farm status for months. Personally, Naxxramas can goto hell as far as i’m concerned, I did it at Level 60, ran weekly pugs at Level 70, and I run it 4 times a week at Level 80. I’m sure there are people out there who share my sentiments, a new raid instance has been long overdue. Ulduar will feature 14 bosses, 11 of them having optional hard modes. Personally, I love the concept behind hard modes, they offer another level of difficulty and more replay value. My only qualm is when achievements like Heroic: You Don’t Have An Eternity and You Don’t Have An Eternity don’t offer any rewards beyond the achievement points. Sartharion 3 Drake is a perfect example of rewarding players for the extra level of difficulty.

Dual Talent Specialization

This is quite possibly one of the most anticipated features to date. Dual Talent Specialization allows you to pickup a second set of talents and glyphs that you can switch to at any given moment (as long as you’re not in combat). When this feature was first announced, you would need to be near a Lexicon of Power in order to switch specs, but it seems they had a last minute change of heart. When the PTR’s went live, the Lexicon of Power requirement was lifted, you can now respec anywhere. I recently setup Dual Specs on my Paladin (Holy/Ret) and Mage, (Frostfire/Arcane) the one time fee you have to pay to your class trainer is currently 1000g, but with the amount of complaining going on…the price may go down. Personally I think 1000g is adequate, but for some people that amount of gold is hard to come by. I can see both sides of the argument.

Argent Tournament

This came as a surprise, I don’t think anyone was expecting this but it seems like a pretty cool concept. The Argent Crusade has setup a new camp just north of Sindragosa’s Fall in Icecrown, they’re in the process of building a coliseum that’s supposedly getting added in a future patch. The whole purpose of this event is to introduce mounted combat, you’ll be able to get a special mount that you can use to fight players and NPC’s. The initial questline teaches you how to use the new Tournament mounts, you get 4 basic abilities - Attack, Ranged Attack, Charge & Block. There’s also bunch of dailies available from Silver Covenant/Sunreaver NPC’s in their respective camps. That’s right, they’ve finally implemented the Silver Covenant and the Sunreavers. I was unable to find a quartermaster for either faction but i’m sure it will be implemented by the time 3.1 goes live.

All in all, Patch 3.1 is looking good, long overdue…but still good! I’m anticipating a 2 month stay on the PTR before going live, so we’re looking at a late April/early May release.